About Willie

Former CEO of international companies
Columbia Business School professor
Consultant to global organizations for creating winning strategies.
Creator of the Strategic Learning Process.
Author of the book, Strategic Learning

Willie's Blog Posts

The Latest Post

The Awesome Power of Questions

How the Wrong Questions Produce the Wrong Answers “If I had 60 minutes to solve a problem … I would spend 55 minutes determining the proper question to ask, then I could solve the problem in less than 5 minutes.” - Albert Einstein Socrates turned the way we learn upside-down. Prior to his revolutionary practice of asking probing questions to unlock insights, roving “Sophists” in Greece taught rhetoric – the...

Read the full article
wpietersen

Meet Willie

“If an organization can’t define its Winning Proposition in a simple way, it cannot claim to have a strategy.”
—from Strategic Learning

Willie Pietersen was raised in South Africa, and received a Rhodes Scholarship to Oxford University. After practicing law, he embarked on an international business career. Over a period of twenty years he served as the CEO of multibillion-dollar businesses such as Lever Foods, Seagram USA, Tropicana and Sterling Winthrop’s Consumer Health Group.

In 1998, Pietersen was named Professor of the Practice of Management at the Columbia University Graduate School of Business. He specializes in strategy and the leadership of change, and his methods and ideas, especially Strategic Learning, are widely applied within Columbia’s executive education programs, and also in numerous corporations.

Full Bio